Impact Story: Marshall Scholars Piper Farmer & Jack Wallace
When the Marshall Scholarship program announced its new cohort of scholars in fall 2025, the list included two Rare Book School staff members: Summer Session Assistant Piper Farmer and Program Assistant Jack Wallace. Wallace and Farmer were selected from a nationwide pool of more than 1,000 applicants, representing numerous professional and academic fields, to receive this prestigious honor. According to the Marshall website, the scholarship aims “to enable intellectually distinguished young Americans, their country’s future leaders, to study in the UK.”
Farmer is completing a degree in Literatures in English, with a minor in History of Art and Creative Writing, at Bryn Mawr College. In 2024, she assisted Barbara Heritage (RBS Miranker Family Director of Collections, Exhibitions & Scholarly Initiatives) with editing Teaching Text Technologies and Critical Bibliography Among the Disciplines (Routledge, 2025). Farmer returned to RBS in 2025 as a Summer Session Assistant, also enrolling in the course B-10: Introduction to the History of Bookbinding. Her RBS experiences, Farmer says, have given her a better sense of “how scholarly editing works, and [a chance to] practice working on those kinds of community relationships that are also important for academia.”
Farmer plans to study Welsh and Celtic literature at Aberystwyth University in Wales, and English at the University of Cambridge. In Aberystwyth, she says, “there’s no accommodation you can stay in that’s not within a five-minute walk of the National Library of Wales.” In October 2025, the city became Wales’ first UNESCO City of Literature. Cambridge, meanwhile, is home to the Centre for Medieval Material Texts and the Parker Library. Farmer is eager to engage with the medieval manuscript collections housed there.
Wallace, a third-year student majoring in English at the University of Virginia (UVA), began working for UVA Special Collections during his first summer in college, during which time he helped pull books for RBS courses. In 2025, Wallace joined the RBS Programs team. “It’s amazing to watch people have aha moments when they set a line of type or pull a hand press,” he says. “Going from theory to practice can be difficult with bibliography or book history, but Rare Book School makes it happen.”
Wallace plans to pursue graduate studies in book history and English at the Institute for English Studies in London and at the University of Warwick in Coventry. “I am hoping to visit as many of the libraries and cultural institutions in the UK as possible, to understand how they are approaching the horizon of literary scholarship and stewardship,” he says. “I hope to draw upon the experience I have had supporting RBS programs to make my work accessible and beneficial for the future.”